ARMONK, N.Y., Feb. 26, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today is launching a set of global initiatives to arm its global ecosystem of business partners to embrace cloud, mobile and big data analytics technologies to generate new revenue streams with new buyers such as the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), Chief of Police and the Chief Financial Officer. IBM is making a significant commitment to the business partner community to help them build innovative solutions that take advantage of advanced technologies enabling clients to tackle the next wave of data intensive business challenges.

According to IDC, the IT industry has been transitioning to a new era of computing built on mobile, cloud services, social networking and big data analytics. In 2013, spending will exceed $2.1 trillion, driven by double-digit growth in mobile, cloud, big data and social technologies - and by emerging markets' growth.*

With today's news, IBM is launching a set of new initiatives to prepare its global ecosystem to capture this growing market opportunity. As the digital consumer continues to demand a unique and personalized experience across multiple channels, IBM offers CMOs and marketers the tools necessary to turn mounds of big data into actionable insights. IBM is empowering its business partners with tools and new services to maximize the efficiency of their own digital marketing efforts and better serve their clients, especially small to midsize businesses in emerging markets such as India and Africa.

IBM will now offer business partners one-year free access to cloud-based IBM Digital Analytics technology that helps businesses analyze big data to identify patterns in customer preferences and transform real-time marketing strategies to target the individual consumer more effectively. With this capability, businesses can mine data on interactions via web, mobile, and other digital channels, including interactions referred from all major social networks, to better adjust and personalize market campaigns based on that insight. With this initiative, business partners will now have free access to this cloud-based technology to apply deep analytics to mine big data and enable them to compete in today's digital and social environment. IBM Business Partners in this program will also receive access to servicesto help them capture, qualify, prioritize and assign client leads more effectively.

Zobrist Consulting Takes Retail to the Next Level with Big Data analytics "As the retail environment has dramatically changed with the proliferation of mobile devices and social media, this is presenting new opportunities for our clients in the retail industry to engage with their consumers in new ways. We see IBM taking another significant step in providing its business partners with un-matched skills, technology and expertise to capture new market opportunities, evolve and innovate as the markets do," said Teresa Zobrist, CEO of Zobrist Consulting.

IBM and Zobrist Consulting's joint clients are seeing a difference. Bishop Company, an online retailer recently created a stronger online presence to develop a unique shopping experience to meet the needs of a younger generation of socially savvy consumers. The site has become the driving force in its growth using IBM Smarter Commerce, enabling its marketing executives to apply deep analytics to promote the right products while quickly responding to changing consumer trends. As a result, Bishop Company's online sales have increased 200 percent.

The proliferation of 10 billion-plus mobile devices by 2020 is creating a sea change in the way businesses are engaging the consumer. IBM is launching a program to help business partners capture the growing mobile opportunity. The new initiative called Ready for IBM MobileFirst is designed to help IBM's business partners develop the right skills to bring innovative mobile solutions to the market in a variety of industries. For example, in healthcare, providing access to patient information via mobile devices to provide a more efficient and orchestrated care response, and in some cases leading to more rapid or accurate diagnoses. Or, by adding mobile commerce capabilities to a banking application, not only automates traditional transactions, but can also provide customers with the ability to instantly deposit a check via a mobile device. Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) will be able to embed mobile technologies into their solutions with the Software Value Plus program, an initiative that rewards business partners who distinguish themselves through industry skills and solutions. IBM will also offer mobile certifications, workshops and incentives for resellers and systems integrators.

IBM Collaborates with Business Partner Sproxil in Emerging Markets to Combat Counterfeit Drugs IBM is collaborating with Business Partner Sproxil leveraging mobile and cloud technologies to help manufacturers view and analyze real time consumer data to detect and prevent drug counterfeiting. Consumers in emerging markets such as India, Ghana, Kenya, and Nigeria can verify the authenticity of prescriptions in seconds with their own mobile phones anytime, anywhere securely through the cloud. Consumer feedback on product genuineness as well as other comments they may have about the product, allows companies to make prescription drugs safer for millions of people who live in areas where counterfeiting is rampant.

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"Mobile represents a significant growth area for the pharmaceutical industry. As the use of smartphones and tablets surges, the pharmaceutical industry needs a strategic understanding of how mobile can play to drive innovation," Sproxil Chief Executive Officer Dr. Ashifi Gogo. "IBM's focus on arming business partners with the right initiatives to bring innovative mobile solutions will be key to help pharma companies manufacture and market safer products more effectively to healthcare providers.

IBM will provide business partners with new skill building capabilities and access to IBM's technical experts at its global network of 42 global Innovation Centers in 36 countries to nurture growth for development of new mobile capabilities while meeting IBM's mobile integration standards. IBM is also enabling IBM Business Partners to help credit-qualified clients take advantage of simple, flexible lease and loan packages for the Ready for IBM MobileFirst portfolio and Big Data analytics, starting at as low as 0% for 12 months with no upfront costs. Additionally, IBM will also provide marketing support to business partners to help reach new buyers in this space.

IBM also announced new initiatives designed to help Business Partners build their solution, selling capabilities around expert integrated systems. Specifically, IBM Systems and Technology Group plans to increase its dedicated channel sales and technical sales specialists by 50 percent in 2013 to assist Business Partners in closing more solution opportunities. In addition, IBM Power Systems is further strengthening its Business Partner incentives. Finally, IBM continues to strengthen and launch new PartnerWorld Specialty and Certification Programs for IBM System x, PureFlex and Flex Systems to assist Business Partners in developing specialized skills to help deliver innovative solutions for clients.

IBM is continuing to invest $150 million in lead generation for business partners with the goal of four times the number of leads passed to Business Partners in 2013 to help grow their business.

"The interdependence of mobile, social, big data and cloud is undeniable, and will only multiply as data growth and mobile use continue," said Mark Hennessy, GM, IBM Global Business Partners. "We are committed to the success of our business partners in this shift in the way we do business across industries and around the globe. To seize this big data opportunity, IBM has laid the foundation for a comprehensive set of initiatives for IBM Business Partners, who are key to our growth strategy, which can help these clients address their business needs as the business grows."

The Workspace-as-a-Service (WaaS) market will grow to $6.4B by 2018. In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Seth Bostock, CEO of IndependenceIT, will begin by walking the audience through the evolution of Workspace as-a-Service, where it is now vs. where it going.
To look beyond the desktop we must understand exactly what WaaS is, who the users are, and where it is going in the future. IT departments, ISVs and service providers must look to workflow and automation capabilities to adapt to growing ...

Business and IT leaders today need better application delivery capabilities to support critical new innovation. But how often do you hear objections to improving application delivery like, “I can harden it against attack, but not on this timeline”; “I can make it better, but it will cost more”; “I can deliver faster, but not with these specs”; or “I can stay strong on cost control, but quality will suffer”? In the new application economy, these tradeoffs are no longer acceptable. Customers will ...

Red Hat has launched the Red Hat Cloud Innovation Practice, a new global team of experts that will assist companies with more quickly on-ramping to the cloud. They will do this by providing solutions and services such as validated designs with reference architectures and agile methodology consulting, training, and support.
The Red Hat Cloud Innovation Practice is born out of the integration of technology and engineering expertise gained through the company’s 2014 acquisitions of leading Ceph s...

Even as cloud and managed services grow increasingly central to business strategy and performance, challenges remain. The biggest sticking point for companies seeking to capitalize on the cloud is data security. Keeping data safe is an issue in any computing environment, and it has been a focus since the earliest days of the cloud revolution. Understandably so: a lot can go wrong when you allow valuable information to live outside the firewall. Recent revelations about government snooping, along...

SYS-CON Events announced today that Dyn, the worldwide leader in Internet Performance, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Dyn is a cloud-based Internet Performance company. Dyn helps companies monitor, control, and optimize online infrastructure for an exceptional end-user experience. Through a world-class network and unrivaled, objective intelligence into Internet conditions, Dyn ensures...

The free version of KEMP Technologies' LoadMaster™ application load balancer is now available for unlimited use, making it easy for IT developers and open source technology users to benefit from all the features of a full commercial-grade product at no cost. It can be downloaded at FreeLoadBalancer.com.
Load balancing, security and traffic optimization are all key enablers for application performance and functionality. Without these, application services will not perform as expected or have the...

Hadoop as a Service (as offered by handful of niche vendors now) is a cloud computing solution that makes medium and large-scale data processing accessible, easy, fast and inexpensive.
In his session at Big Data Expo, Kumar Ramamurthy, Vice President and Chief Technologist, EIM & Big Data, at Virtusa, will discuss how this is achieved by eliminating the operational challenges of running Hadoop, so one can focus on business growth. The fragmented Hadoop distribution world and various PaaS soluti...

As organizations shift toward IT-as-a-service models, the need for managing and protecting data residing across physical, virtual, and now cloud environments grows with it. CommVault can ensure protection &E-Discovery of your data – whether in a private cloud, a Service Provider delivered public cloud, or a hybrid cloud environment – across the heterogeneous enterprise.
In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Randy De Meno, Chief Technologist - Windows Products and Microsoft Partnerships, will disc...

VictorOps is making on-call suck less with the only collaborative alert management platform on the market.
With easy on-call scheduling management, a real-time incident timeline that gives you contextual relevance around your alerts and powerful reporting features that make post-mortems more effective, VictorOps helps your IT/DevOps team solve problems faster.

Skytap Inc., has appointed David Frost as vice president of professional services. David joins Skytap from Deloitte Consulting where he served as Managing Director leading SAP, Cloud, and Advanced Technology Services. At Skytap, David will head the company's professional services organization, and spearhead a new consulting practice that will guide IT organizations through the adoption of DevOps best practices. David's appointment comes on the heels of Skytap's recent $35 million Series D fundin...

Cloud data governance was previously an avoided function when cloud deployments were relatively small. With the rapid adoption in public cloud – both rogue and sanctioned, it’s not uncommon to find regulated data dumped into public cloud and unprotected. This is why enterprises and cloud providers alike need to embrace a cloud data governance function and map policies, processes and technology controls accordingly.
In her session at 15th Cloud Expo, Evelyn de Souza, Data Privacy and Compliance...

Skeuomorphism usually means retaining existing design cues in something new that doesn’t actually need them. However, the concept of skeuomorphism can be thought of as relating more broadly to applying existing patterns to new technologies that, in fact, cry out for new approaches.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Gordon Haff, Senior Cloud Strategy Marketing and Evangelism Manager at Red Hat, will discuss why containers should be paired with new architectural practices such as microservices ra...

Roberto Medrano, Executive Vice President at SOA Software, had reached 30,000 page views on his home page - http://RobertoMedrano.SYS-CON.com/ - on the SYS-CON family of online magazines, which includes Cloud Computing Journal, Internet of Things Journal, Big Data Journal, and SOA World Magazine. He is a recognized executive in the information technology fields of SOA, internet security, governance, and compliance. He has extensive experience with both start-ups and large companies, having been ...

There are many considerations when moving applications from on-premise to cloud. It is critical to understand the benefits and also challenges of this migration. A successful migration will result in lower Total Cost of Ownership, yet offer the same or higher level of robustness.
In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Michael Meiner, an Engineering Director at Oracle, Corporation, will analyze a range of cloud offerings (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) and discuss the benefits/challenges of migrating to each of...

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is a technology designed to make DevOps easier and allow developers to focus on application development. The PaaS takes care of provisioning, scaling, HA, and other cloud management aspects. Apache Stratos is a PaaS codebase developed in Apache and designed to create a highly productive developer environment while also supporting powerful deployment options.
Integration with the Docker platform, CoreOS Linux distribution, and Kubernetes container management system ...

The industrial software market has treated data with the mentality of “collect everything now, worry about how to use it later.” We now find ourselves buried in data, with the pervasive connectivity of the (Industrial) Internet of Things only piling on more numbers. There’s too much data and not enough information.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Bob Gates, Global Marketing Director, GE’s Intelligent Platforms business, to discuss how realizing the power of IoT, software developers are now focu...

Operational Hadoop and the Lambda Architecture for Streaming Data
Apache Hadoop is emerging as a distributed platform for handling large and fast incoming streams of data. Predictive maintenance, supply chain optimization, and Internet-of-Things analysis are examples where Hadoop provides the scalable storage, processing, and analytics platform to gain meaningful insights from granular data that is typically only valuable from a large-scale, aggregate view. One architecture useful for capturing...

SYS-CON Events announced today that Vitria Technology, Inc. will exhibit at SYS-CON’s @ThingsExpo, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Vitria will showcase the company’s new IoT Analytics Platform through live demonstrations at booth #330. Vitria’s IoT Analytics Platform, fully integrated and powered by an operational intelligence engine, enables customers to rapidly build and operationalize advanced analytics to deliver timely business outcomes ...

The Internet of Things (IoT) promises to evolve the way the world does business; however, understanding how to apply it to your company can be a mystery. Most people struggle with understanding the potential business uses or tend to get caught up in the technology, resulting in solutions that fail to meet even minimum business goals.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Jesse Shiah, CEO / President / Co-Founder of AgilePoint Inc., showed what is needed to leverage the IoT to transform your business. ...

DevOps is about increasing efficiency, but nothing is more inefficient than building the same application twice. However, this is a routine occurrence with enterprise applications that need both a rich desktop web interface and strong mobile support. With recent technological advances from Isomorphic Software and others, it is now feasible to create a rich desktop and tuned mobile experience with a single codebase, without compromising performance or usability.

Trust is the fundamental building block of any relationship. Whether it's personal or business, trust is something that cannot be replaced with anything. There are hundreds of books available on how to cultivate business relationships, how to maintain them, and how to leverage the best from them and so on. What forms the basis of a business relationship and what are the fundamental blocks of building trust? Here are three things that will get you started when thinking about using trust building trust and maintaining trust.

The Internet of Things has emerged as the universally accepted term for the ‘next big thing’ wave, not replacing but building upon the Cloud Computing cycle, which itself built upon SaaS and ASPs.
There are many technology aspects to this trend, which will be covered extensively throughout this guide and ongoing series, but overall our goal is to describe the associated startup venture opportunities.
Indeed it’s not limited to startups, the IoT represents a new product innovation platform for any and all businesses, and this is the overall theme of this paper.

An anatomy of startup ventures for the Internet of Things market. Like GE describes in their white paper Pushing the Boundaries of Mind and Machine, this is basically a process of innovating through more intelligent machines to reinvent workflow models.
For a useful overview as to what constitutes an ‘IoT startup’, check out one example for some key characteristics: Hutgrip. Hutgrip is a SaaS solution that replaces VPNs with the Cloud and real time analytics, with the headline points being:
Clear description of the business benefit the new technology will bring – Smarter automation of bi...

In my first blog I wrote about SharePoint System Performance Health Checks beyond looking at CPU and Memory Metrics. In this blog, I cover deployment related performance health problems that I always check when looking at a SharePoint Installation. Especially after deploying new hardware, new sites, pages, views, custom or third-party Web Parts (e.g., from AvePoint, K2, Nintex, Metalogix, etc.) it’s important to perform certain deployment sanity checks. While you may have nobody reporting issues in the moment there are several areas that you constantly need to check before they become a real p...

Creating global change that is actually good for the entire world is a mammoth task. With a population of almost 7 Billion people as of 2015, the planet is taking a toll with surviving the brunt of keeping the works going. What role can Cloud Computing play in making it easier for all of us?

One important differentiator between what passed for digital back in the dot-com days and today’s notion of digital is the role mobile plays. Yes, this company had a mobile site, and they had what the AVP claimed was a “mobile first” plan for their web content, but as yet they had yet to roll out any responsive design. In the final analysis, their digital effort up to this point boiled down to little more than better brochureware, a la 1990s web redesigns.
But more significantly, what was entirely missing from their digital achievements (although the AVP did indicate that it was a roadmap i...

FedRAMP defines the requirements for cloud service providers’ security controls, including vulnerability scanning, incident monitoring, logging, and reporting. CSPs in use at federal agencies or in acquisition must meet the cloud computing requirements defined by FedRAMP.
Whether or not your company currently works with government agencies, there are several benefits to preparing for FedRAMP.

The challenge facing today’s project management professionals is supporting a more agile approach to software releases while managing orderly governance and production controls that are necessary. Project managers have become air traffic controllers landing more projects more frequently on more runways, and as the skies become more crowded it’s important to understand both the trends and some strategies for managing the increasingly agile enterprise.

Our guest on the podcast this week is Mark Thiele, EVP of Data Center Technology at Switch.
We discuss the idea that private clouds are often equated with do-it-yourself and why that should be changed.
Taking sure you are receiving the private environment you need at a cost that can support your business.
Listen in to learn the different ways to own and manage a private cloud.

It’s easy to fall into a pattern of dysfunctional releases, release processes that are characterized by delay, inefficiency, and endless meetings that encourage people to view releases as a problem. These are the kinds of meetings that inspire references to the movie Office Space or emails that include clippings of the cartoon Dilbert - repetitive meetings to answer the same questions over and over again all because people lack the tools to connect the issue tracker with the change management systems.
In organizations without a reliable process a release is also a time for production system o...

A large US insurance carrier, based in the Midwest, has improved its applications’ lifecycle to make enterprise mobility a must-have business strength.
This five-part series of penetrating discussions on the latest in enterprise mobility explores advancements in applications design and deployment technologies across the full spectrum of edge devices and operating environments.
Our next innovation interview focuses on how a large US insurance carrier, based in the Midwest, has improved its applications’ lifecycle to make enterprise mobility a must-have business strength.

DevOps is all about removing barriers to rapid, safe delivery of new experiences to your customers. Much of this revolves around automating error-prone, human-driven processes so that processes can be standardized, scaled, and varied programmatically. Some of the types of tools used in a DevOps-minded organization might include version control systems, automation servers, and configuration management systems. Many tools can be used across categories, with varying amounts of success. Some vendors offer products that claim to address all of these needs with one solution – most rarely deliver on ...

Application metrics, logs, and business KPIs are a goldmine. It’s easy to get started with the ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana) – you can see lots of people coming up with impressive dashboards, in less than a day, with no previous experience. Going from proof-of-concept to production tends to be a bit more difficult, unfortunately, and it tends to gobble up our attention, time, and money.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Otis Gospodnetić, co-author of Lucene in Action and founder of Sematext, will share the architecture and decisions behind Sematext’s services for handling larg...

Containers and microservices have become topics of intense interest throughout the cloud developer and enterprise IT communities.
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Containers are not being considered for the first time by the cloud community, but a current era of re-consideration has pushed them to the top of the cloud agenda. With the launch of Docker's initial release in March of 2013, interest was revved up several notches. Then late last...

Over the last couple of years I have talked to numerous enterprise customers, analysts, industry pundits, and others interested in cloud technologies, and one thing is abundantly clear – Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) seems to mean different things to different people. But the term PaaS is irrelevant – it's just noise. What is relevant, and what is important, is what PaaS does: enable applications. That's what enterprises care about. They want to accelerate application development to get products to market faster and into users' hands sooner.

The competition among public cloud providers is red hot, private cloud continues to grab increasing shares of IT budgets, and hybrid cloud strategies are beginning to conquer the enterprise IT world.

Big Data is driving dramatic leaps in resource requirements and capabilities, and now the Internet of Things promises an exponential leap in the size of the Internet and Worldwide Web.

The world of SDX now encompasses Software-Defined Data Centers (SDDCs) as the technology world prepares for the Zettabyte Age.

Add the key topics of WebRTC and DevOps into the mix, and you have three days of pure cloud computing that you simply cannot miss.

Cloud Expo - the world's most established event - offers a vast selection of 130+ technical and strategic Industry Keynotes, General Sessions, Breakout Sessions, and signature Power Panels. The exhibition floor features 100+ exhibitors offering specific solutions and comprehensive strategies. The floor also features two Demo Theaters that give delegates the opportunity to get even closer to the technology they want to see and the people who offer it.

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